Forget the Rapture: May 21 Is National Apocalypse Day —A Celebration of Peak Humanity

America is a great country because its citizens get to choose not only their own ideologies and their own versions of where their president was born, but also their own apocalypses. No matter that end-of-the-world predictions have been history's most reliable con, and that the tendency to spout even the most considered contemplations of Armageddon is the sign of an easy mark. As you might have heard, a dismaying number of your fellow citizens believe the Big Event is nigh — nigh, as in "sometime tomorrow" nigh — with an even more dismaying number erring on the side of caution and saying Jesus, or an asteroid with our name on it, is going to hold out till 2025. We might not be as optimistic as we once were, but we're sure optimistic about the prospect of doomsday, with polls consistently showing that about half of all Americans believe that biblical prophecies of the end of the world will come to bloody fruition before the end of this century.

And that's just the religionists. Such is the American yearn for a customized eschatology that even committed secularists have come up with their own share of apocalyptic scenarios, from Global Warming to Peak Oil, most of which have the advantage of being eminently plausible, even proven, as the polar ice melts, the sea levels rise, the earth divides into extremes of drought and flood, and oil from ever more inaccessible and precarious gushers spills over the increasingly depleted seas. And yet the end is never really near, and despite its scientific pedigree, environmental eschatology will probably prove to be as much a sucker's game as the theological brand, for what it doesn't take into account is humanity's resilience and capacity for invention and adaptation.

And so it's in the spirit of credulity — in the can-do spirit of Americans who know they're going to get fleeced at the carnival or the casino and yet insist on their God-given right to do so — that I propose that May 21 be recognized as National Apocalypse Day. Does that mean the world is going to end tomorrow? Nah — it means that it's not, but that all Americans will be given the opportunity to insist that it is, in a manner congenial to their own temperaments and beliefs. And if from the smorgasbord of doomsday possibilities you don't find anything to your liking — if the combination of the Christian and Mayan calendars is insufficiently rife with foreboding — well, I just happen to have a freshly minted apocalypse right here:

Peak Humanity.

The United States was still celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden when the United Nations issued its report on Peak Humanity. Except it wasn't called Peak Humanity; the report the UN issued on May 3 was simply a revision of its previous estimate that the human population of earth would peak at about nine billion in 2100. The new estimate: 10.2 billion. That's a lot of damned people, especially when one considers...

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/may-21-apocalypse-day-5774135?src=rss

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